U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/532,223 filed Mar. 22, 2000, which is assigned to PowerQuest Corporation and incorporated herein by reference, describes tools and techniques for storing and recovering images in a computer partition, and more particularly tools and techniques for placing and extracting disk partition images to and from the same partition that is imaged. However, preferred embodiments of the present invention operate to permit image recovery using an image stored in what was once a partition even when a working partition is no longer present, e.g., when the partition table has been overwritten or corrupted. Thus, although an embodiment of the present invention may comprise technology claimed in application Ser. No. 09/532,223, the present invention goes substantially beyond the teachings of that previous application.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/788,191 filed Feb. 17, 2001, which is assigned to PowerQuest Corporation and incorporated herein by reference, describes tools and techniques for running pre-boot code on a computer from a file stored in a file system on the computer; the pre-boot code may be obtained by redirecting floppy drive I/O. It discusses a “virtual floppy” technology which can be used to provide a virtual boot environment for the present invention. However, preferred embodiments of the present invention restore or install a disk image by pulling it out of a container on disk and then installing the image on the disk that held the image container. The nature of the images involved in the two patent applications also differs somewhat, since the virtual floppy image does not necessarily contain a working partition with an installed standard operating system, whereas the present invention's recovery image typically does. Some preferred embodiments of the present invention also lock the container on disk to prevent it from being inadvertently moved, deleted, or modified, a feature which is not required by the virtual floppy technology. Although the virtual floppy image may be loaded from the hard disk, the virtual floppy technology also contemplates routinely loading the image off a CD or other secondary medium instead of the disk, whereas the present invention preferably requires no secondary medium apart from the computer's hard disk(s). Thus, although for one or more of these reasons an embodiment of the present invention may comprise technology claimed in application Ser. No. 09/788,191, the present invention also goes substantially beyond the teachings of that previous application.
PowerQuest Corporation designs, implements, and commercially provides software for computer storage imaging, such as the PowerQuest DRIVE IMAGE® and V2I products. V2I is a mark, and DRIVE IMAGE is a registered mark, of PowerQuest Corporation. Imaging is also discussed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,253,300 and 6,108,697, which are assigned to PowerQuest. Propagation of computer storage images to multiple computers is sometimes referred to as “deployment” but in the present application deployment implies installation of an image onto one or more computers, which differs from merely placing an image file or container on a machine without installing the image there.
Gateway 2000, Inc. is assignee of U.S. Pat. No. 5,966,732, which discusses a method for expanding the reserve area of a disk drive to allow computer system manufacturers to change the storage capacity of the reserve area. The computer system manufacturer can add critical data and critical program instructions to the expanded or new reserve area. The computer manufacturer may decide to store a portion of a virus scan program in the expanded reserve area, or store a portion of the basic input output system (BIOS) so that a smaller BIOS read only memory (ROM) can be used for the computer system, or the computer manufacturer can store emergency boot up instructions in the reserve area in the event there is damage to the disk. A disk image for recovering a disk's partition(s) according to the present invention could be stored in such a reserve area on the disk, but a keyword search of U.S. Pat. No. 5,966,732 disclosed no uses of “image”, “imaging”, “recovery”, or “recovering”.
Phoenix Technologies, Inc. has disclosed a Boot Engineering Extension Record (BEER) proposal, which is discussed in document T13/D98128RO available under specified conditions from Technical Committee T13 of the InterNational Committee on Information Technology Standards (INCITS); see www.t13.org. The stated goals of the BEER proposal are to “1. Enable BIOS, Option ROM, and OS software to provide the user with a simple, consistent way of addressing all of the storage devices on a PC. 2. Provide a mechanism for the user to select any bootable device. In the case of a mass storage device, the user should be able to pick any bootable partition. 3. The mechanisms in this proposal are designed to last 20 years or more.” Some preferred embodiments of the present invention comprise selecting a virtual boot option. Unlike the BEER proposal, however, preferred recovery solutions of the present invention operate on standard hardware and firmware, such as industry standard ATA IDE or SCSI hard drive systems commonly sold in the retail market, without additional modification beyond the software that is documented here.
During “proof of concept” testing of aspects of the present invention, inventor Jared Gaunt created a main partition and a secondary partition on a disk, placed a disk image into the secondary partition, and then merged the secondary partition into the main partition. This provided a single partition having a file containing an image which could then be brought into memory piece-by-piece and laid over the disk, overwriting the main partition. A preliminary name for the present invention was “single disk single partition recovery”. U.S. Pat. No. 6,185,666, which is assigned to PowerQuest Corporation, describes tools and techniques for merging computer disk partitions. However, an advantage of some preferred embodiments of the present invention is that no working partition is required.